A large variety of patents are concerned with the type of protection offered by an armor module namely reactive armors or passive armors. At times, there are provided combined reactive and passive armor elements.
Such armors are disclosed, for example, in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,318,301, 4,741,244, 5,070,764, 5,637,824, and German Publication 4,237,798A1.
Prior art armor assemblies disclose an armor assembly comprising a housing (often referred to in the art interchangeably as “a tile”, “a box”, “a module”, “casing”, etc.), with one or more cassettes fixedly received in the housing in a position corresponding with an anticipated oncoming projectile.
The one or more cassettes received within the casing are usually comprised of several layers having two outer members made of an inert material, e.g. a metal plate, sandwiching between them at least one layer of explosive material, at times with several other inert materials disposed in between. Typically, the cassettes are so arranged that the axis of an impinging projectile and of a jet formed upon deformation thereof generates with the surface of the wall's structure an acute angle of about 45°.
Casings of armor modules as known heretofore typically have a rectangle section as illustrated for example in the above-mentioned U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,381,301, 5,070,764, and in the German Publication 4,237,798A1.
It is, however, appreciated that the casing is in fact a parasitic agent as far as overall weight of the armor module is concerned, since the active components of the armor module are the cassettes (reactive or passive or any combination thereof).
The arrangement of cassettes extending askew with respect to an axes of the housing has two significant drawbacks. First, adjacent top and bottom edges of a housing, the cassettes are significantly short and do not provide sufficient ballistic length, i.e. effective minimal length of the cassettes required for efficiently destroying/stopping a charged-shape projectile. This drawback is at times referred to as an end effect. As a result, when the length of an extreme top or an extreme bottom cassette is extended so as to provide the above-mentioned minimum effective length, the armor module becomes significantly larger and thus heavier as a result of increase in dimension of the housing.
A second disadvantage of the heretofore known modules is such that an essentially horizontal gap existing between neighboring modules when two modules are successively mounted on top of one another, accumulates to the end effect of an armor module.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a novel armor module comprising a new sign of a housing which overcomes the above-mentioned drawbacks whilst not deteriorating the overall ballistic performances.